The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to the delivery of services to a user of a mobile terminal. The services may be in the form of a particular media or communication application desired by the user, such as a music player, a game player, an electronic book, short messages, email, etc. The services may also be in the form of interactive applications in which the user may respond to a network device in order to perform a task or achieve a goal. The services may be provided from a network server or other network device, or even from the mobile terminal such as, for example, a mobile telephone, a mobile television, a mobile gaming system, etc.
In certain applications, it is necessary for the user to enter data into forms. XForms represent the next generation forms markup, which replaces traditional forms in, for example, XHTML 2.0. XForms can also be used with other markups such as synchronized media integration language (SMIL). XForms provide certain advantages such as device independency, separation of data from presentation, and compatibility with extensible markup language (XML) infrastructure. However, standard XForms also have disadvantages. For example, standard XForms implementations can be heavy in resource consumption for certain platforms such as mobile terminals which have limited resources. Accordingly, XForms Basic, which uses a simpler syntax, was developed in order to provide mobile terminals with a more lightweight profile of XForms. However, standard XForms use Schemas for user input validation, and Schemas are not supported in XForms Basic. Thus, if a particular service uses Schemas for validation, a mobile implementation will neither be able to validate user input, nor have access to data type information which could be essential to providing an advantageous usability (such as allowing data input via a particular data input widget). Schema information is typically delivered in a separate file which a form file refers to in XForms by using a schema attribute of a model element.
Accordingly, there is a need for providing compatibility between forms markup languages such as between XForms Basic, or mobile XForms, and the data types and Schema associated with the full XForms standard. This is particularly the case in mobile environments where resources may be limited and thus, it is important that increased capability be provided with resources that can be efficiently employed.